By MATT RICHTEL and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO; Matt Richtel reported from San Jose, Calif., for this article and Alexei Barrionuevo from New York

Denny Lynch sat at a booth at a Wendy's restaurant, finishing bites of a chicken sandwich between cellphone calls. Mr. Lynch, a Wendy's executive, was one of only a few lunchtime patrons at the normally buzzing restaurant, where lately business is...

A woman bit into part of a human finger while eating a bowl of chili at a Wendy's restaurant, health officials in San Jose said. Officials said the fingertip was about one-and-a-half inches long and contained part of a manicured nail. The woman, who...

SINCE the beginning, humans have made big use of their thumbs -- for grasping sticks, hitching rides, rating movies and so on. Now, for millions of people, the thumb has evolved into a preferred mode of 21st-century communication. You can glimpse...

Leaning alone against a wall, wearing sunglasses on a rainy afternoon, Daisuke Yoshioka is a black-jacketed image of urban loneliness. But, for this member of Japan's thumb generation, a cyberweb of friends is only thumb strokes away. ''I get...